Constant Contact Newsletter Signup Form

film

Free to Love: Cinema of the Sexual Revolution

Boys in the Sand

Get Tickets

FOR FILMS AND EVENTS PRESENTED BY IHP, Tickets ARE Also Available From the IHP Box Office, which is normally open Tue-Sat from noon-8pm (or, for events outside of those times, from one hour before until one hour after the scheduled starting time). call 215-387-5125, menu option 2.

dir. Wakefield Poole, US, 1971, HD, 90 min.

This program contains adult content

One
of the first films to bring porn to the mainstream, it’s hard to imagine now
the impact that Boys in the Sand had upon its release. Arguably the
first pornographic film to spoof the title of a mainstream feature (The Boys
in the Band was produced off-Broadway with a film version directed by
William Friedkin in 1970), the shoestring-budget independent feature made back
its budget the first day it opened. With a heavy press campaign that included
full-page ads in The New York Times and Variety, the film was a
smash hit and helped usher in the Golden Age of Porn, paving the way for later
successes like Deep Throat and Beyond the Green Door.

Boys in the Sand follows Casey Donovan and his all-male encounters on Fire
Island. The lyrical imagery and pastoral idealism of the settings are intercut
generously with hardcore action and vice-versa. Filmmaker Wakefield Poole was
looking to create a film of “high profile homosexuality with no guilt.”

While the porno chic era came on strong thanks to Boys in the Sand and
other hits of the early 1970s, it was not to last. The 1980s brought the
invention of home video, which brought porn from a collectively experienced
phenomenon to something to be watched in private, ultimately changing the
material into something less narrative-based and more sexually explicit and
illicit. But Boys in the Sand provides a look back to the beginnings of
porn’s Golden Age, a time when the aesthetics and spirit of independent
filmmaking still seeped into the X-movies.